Frank Liu developed a technique he calls “style transfer” in which he renders an image in the style of another.

Bhautik Joshi riffed off of that for video, resulting in experiments like this rendering of clips from Blade Runner in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

Prisma has capitalized on this technique by taking it mobile. I've enjoyed using the app to render some photos in my camera roll in a variety of styles. I had previously found expensive apps and plugins on the desktop that could do something like this, but now it's available in a free mobile app. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a free app on your phone, eventually.

I'm looking forward to when Prisma can handle video, it's only a matter of time before style transfer videos like the one above are flooding your social media feeds.

A market opportunity for human ingenuity remains, however, for those who can actually transfer not just the visual style but the entire cinematic grammar of one artist to another. What if Werner Herzog directed Toy Story? What if Stanley Kubrick directed Star Wars? Who wants to see Terrence Malick's take on Captain America?

I draw much too much pleasure from style transfer in prose, like imitations of Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and the such. James Wood once wrote of McCarthy:

To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape. He is also one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.